Exploding sheep trope
I think at the time siss boom bah was much more familiar as a college cheer. The delivery and the absurdity of an exploding sheep made the joke plus Ed’s reaction was priceless.
A couple of my favorite Carnac jokes come to mind. For the first, you have to know that Dippity-Do was a hair gel popular at the time.
“Dippity-Do”
“On a cold morning, what forms on your Dippity?”
“Peter Pan”
“Where do you fry your Peter?”
NOW I laughed!
BAAAAAAaaaaa [fades away]
eta: I think dead innocent sheep, blown to bits, is not funny. Sheep flying through the air like the coyote in a road runner cartoon is funny. even if in real life they’d both be just as dead
Logical, but not funny.
The old style of cheering was already on its way out 20 years ago:
… to the typical college athlete, who probably spends as many hours a day blasting Nelly on headphones as listening to the sounds of the natural world, nothing sounds as utterly square as “Rah! Rah! Rah!”
It’s not of my era but I’d just note that, these days, you can play games where you run around stealing things, shooting people, etc. Putting a stick of dynamite down an animal’s gullet and blowing it up is something you might see in any particular comedy movie, since the gross-out era.
I’d postulate that such an idea wasn’t as common nor as appropriate at the time of the joke.
So, not only are you taking a somewhat commonly known phrase and giving people a diametrically opposite view of it; you’re also introducing them to, potentially, one of the first gross-out jokes on maintime TV, with a mental image of a sheep turning into blood splatter.
One of teh biggest socio-cultural functions of humour is to delineate who is in and who is out. Because humour requires a shared understandign of the world, a common set of assumptions, knowledge, values, attitudes, understandind and use of language etc. And humour does this through a simple and almost undefeatable mechanism - you laugh or you don’t.
There are few things more rewarding and validating than telling a joke to a crowd and getting a big laugh. There is practically nothing more lonely or crushing than telling a joke and dying horribly. There’s something very comforting about being part of the laughing crowd, and something very discomforting about being the one person who doesn’t laugh.
The joke was really funny then because Carson, McMahon, and the audience shared various assumptions: that the phrase Sis-Boom-Bah has a clear and familiar context; that it was innately amusing; that the idea of exploding sheep is incongruous, outrageous, and comically absurd to the nth degree.
Nowadays, we do not share most of these assumptions. We can see that in Enlgihs the sounds “sis-boom-bah” have a pleasing prosody, but the humour of cartoonish violence has long since outstripped mere exploding sheep and most importantly, we don’t have a familiar context to locate “sis-boom-bah” in that means the idea of exploding sheep strikes us surprisingly left-field. Our reaction is more “Yeah, sure, sound of an exploding sheep, I guess” because we just don’t have a bunch of referents for the phrase so it floats freely waiting for any explanation.
So Carson et al are “in” and we are “out”. Society and humour and shared norms and cultural associations have all moved on. You can in many ways measure the evolution of society by what’s considered funny and what’s not.
Best use of this I’ve ever heard of. In the UK the deodorant Lynx (Axe in the US) was marketed with a very noughties ‘tongue in cheek’ campaign showing spotty teenage boys applying it and suddenly attracting gorgeous pouting lingerie models in droves.
How did the ad guys know where do draw the line in doing material about sex/sexiness for late teenage boys? They did a kind of focus group but rather than ask them what they did and didn’t understand about flirting, kissing, bras etc they got a stand up to do a comedy routine about all this stuff. What they laughed at was stuff they knew and understood and got, and went into the ads, and the bits they didn’t laugh at were bits they had no understanding of and got left out. You might bluster or brag or lie in a focus group, but you can’t successfully fake getting jokes about stuff.
If the boss goes around telling everyone that he’s going to tell the mother of all jokes, it’s going to damn well get the mother of all laughs whether it’s funny or not.
If you don’t associate “sis-boom-bah” with fireworks or other explosions, the joke is a triple pun: each syllable relates to something separate from its main connotation. Even double puns are rare, so a triple one is really unusual; I only know one other (which is less funny but much more satisfying to me).
The joke also forces the audience to parse it, which for most will involve creating a visual image of the sheep with dynamite attached, and then its plaintive dying call as it’s bleating out. It’s a horrible image, and sometimes things are so horrible that they move into funny.
The combination–a triple pun with a terrible but silly image–seems like pretty solid comedic material.
I’ve observed before that, in general, the smaller the set of people who get a joke, the funnier it is to those people who do get it. Thus, for instance, jokes that require knowledge of some specific profession will often crack up people in that profession, even as everyone else goes “Huh?”. And the funniest jokes of all are in-jokes, that only make sense to a circle of a half-dozen friends.
Three brothers decided to get into the cattle ranching business, but they couldn’t decide what to call their ranch. So they asked their dad. He said that it was obvious, the ranch should be called “focus”, because it’s where the sons raise meat.
I am basing everything I say on having recently read Funny Or Die, a book by Joel Morris, a British comedy writer with a fantastic CV, which starts off by saying that he knows what the funniest joke in the world is.
It’s the joke shared in hushed tones by siblings in the middle of their parent’s funeral.
(Don’t buy the book! The crowdfund publishers ripped him off, he hasn’t been paid for the books he has sold and he won’t be for future sales. That’s the only reason I’m not recommending it, it’s brilliant.)
Focus?
No one here has yet explained where the “bah” part of the college cheer “Sis Boom Bah” comes from. “Sis” is a lit fuse, “boom” is an explosion, but what is “bah” supposed to mean?
It seems it was supposed to be the sound made by a crowd watching fireworks - in some versions of the cheer, it is rendered as “ahh”, a satisfied sound of many people collectively impressed by the spectacle. Here’s a West Virginia University cheer from 1907: “Rah rah rhu, W.V.U., Sis, boom, ah, Tiger!”
Some versions use “Zip, boom, bah” or “S-s-s-s, boom, ah” or even “Rip, zip, bazoo”.
Evidently a B was commonly added to the “ah” part, perhaps because people forgot that it was supposed to represent a particular noise. It was just a fun thing to yell, like “boom-a-lacka”, “reckity-ex-ex-ex” or “oski wow wow”.
I don’t think “Sis Boom Bah” is supposed to be fireworks at all (although I acknowledge some cites claim that). I’ve always heard it as a drum lick - cymbal, bass drum, snare (or Tom).
Marching bands drum lines would go “Sis Boom Bah” by crashing symbols, whacking the bass drum, and hitting the toms/snares. The crowd could cheer along with “Sis Boom Bah”.
ETA: I’ll add that the internet strongly backs up the fireworks explanation, so “aaahhh” seems to be the only reasonable explanation for the “bah” sound.
That’s exactly the one!
Alternate spelling for the final line:
He said that it was obvious, the ranch should be called “focus”, because it’s where the sun’s rays meet.
It’s especially brilliant because, under the two meanings, each word fills a different grammatical role:
sons/sun’s: subjective noun/possessive noun
raise/rays: transitive verb/subjective noun
meat/meet: objective noun/intransitive verb
I’ve never yet had anyone laugh at it, but it’s tremendously satisfying to my nerdy little brain.
I just assumed it was a sexual joke, because everything usually is, and thought the best answer was “circle jerk,” which even sounds like an old time brand.
A similar “Carnac” was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Which was recognizable as a WWII song. Also an older reference rather than a current, for the time, reference.
The question in the envelope: “What should you do if you’ve swallowed a live hand grenade?”
I remember he really hated having to interview Survivor losers, and made no attempt to hide it.
FWIW Carson and McMahon were all giggly before he told the joke (a nip or two?), so any joke might have brought a big reaction out of them.